Throw Together Adventures

So what do you do when two of your seven players fail to show up for the campaign? Do you call it for the night and try again later? Or do you pull up that random character generator, run a random dungeon creator, and laugh at the guy who gets the six levels of commoner? If you chose option B, congratulations you are reading the perfect blog! Conflicting alignments and a nonsense dungeon layout, and a party that offers no sense of balance,  quickly leads to a deteriorating situation of player on player violence, and the commoner of course gets pushed into a pool that turns him into a goblin.

The system: D&D 3.0, because that's what the generators use.
Tools:

• Characters: http://www.hailscape.com/
• Dungeon: http://donjon.bin.sh/d20/dungeon/
• Players: As many as you can fit at your gaming table. The more the merrier. 

Basis for the story, in a very small back woods town, a group of adventurers listens to the ramblings of drunken man as he reveals to them a dungeon filled with riches and wonder on the outskirts of town in an abandoned and broken down temple. The temple is a one hour horse ride from town, which is always an uneventful journey.

This is a very good way to force players to move outside of their comfort zone and also a great way to practice enforcing things like languages and alignment restrictions. If the players can some how muster together long enough to accomplish something, they will find an collapsed entrance at the back of the temple that will reveal the random dungeon's entrance. 

First Step - Bring on the Crazy

Well after getting together with a good friend and my co-authors, we decided to start the night with a very special campaign known as the Slacker Campaign. 

This campaign uses the Basic Role-Playing System (BRP) a simple yet effective percentile based system.

The setting is a simple town of no importance and the characters all essentially the biggest losers imaginable. Each character got to choose 4 "Slacker" skills. (Mine were: Craft 80's Haircut, Professional Air Guitar, Shoveling, and Drive Unmarked Delivery Van) 

After meeting our good friend Rex (NPC) at his workplace (run down movie rental place) we were drawn into a very uncomfortable situation by a man who used excrement to power his mystical spells. We used the man's DVD-Case Golem as a distraction in order to acquire salt to fight the man's slug infested enemies. Sticking to our characters inability to deal with life they simple fled home to one of the characters grandmother's basements. I'll leave the story there since I'm sure you can tell just how unserious this story line was. 

The campaign was meant to pull us away from the normal settings we have been running lately and it did this in a very unexpected and yet delightful way. You should know that we finished the campaign by defeating the slug like creatures in a battle of the Air-Bands competition where our characters used the power of Dragonforce-Through the Fire and Flames, to destroy the bar and the monsters alike. 

Oh if you expected to see anything resembling normal on this page I'm terribly sorry to disappoint you. - Matt